Top stories of 2011

What a newsy year. Of all that happened in downtown S.A. in 2011, I can’t get over the copious amounts of public meetings. The eleventh year after Y2K will go down as the Year of the Public Meeting. My goodness. There were so many of them I just stopped going. HemisFair Park and Centro Partnership accounted for a lot of the meetings. But it seemed like every two weeks there was some kind of required public forum. What we accomplished in 2011 was the ability to meet.

Conversely, the argument could be made that there weren’t enough public meetings. Where were the public processes for Durango Boulevard and the River Walk’s LED lights display?

In compiling this list of 2011’s top stories, I chose 10, but there were easily 10 others which garnered strong consideration. For example, the passing of stricter smoking and panhandling ordinances certainly had people talking. The inception of the B-cycle program was a huge story because of its popularity out of the box. And who can forget the race for City Council District 1? Civil rights lawyer Diego Bernal came out of nowhere to capture the seat.

But enough exposition. Here’s the top stories of 2011:

. . .1. A great loss

BENJAMIN OLIVO / MYSA.COM

The top story of 2011 was a death. At least it felt like a person died. Maybe not family, but a close acquaintance. I’m serious.

In the wee hours of Oct. 1, the historic Wolfson Building, 100 N. Main Ave., caught fire across from Main Plaza. By the time the fire was extinguished later that morning, the building was pronounced a complete loss. The blaze also damaged the bottom floors of the adjacent 21-story Riverview Towers.

The building had most recently been the home of Mexican restaurant Poblano’s on Main and Meat Market Barbecue. In 1880, the building first housed Wolfon’s Dry Goods and Clothing store. According to city archives, Mexican Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna used the site as his headquarters after the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. In 1904, the building was heavily damaged by a fire and had to be rebuilt. Designed by prominent architect Alfred Giles, the Wolfson was one of the last original buildings left around Main Plaza.

The story was even more heartbreaking when you considered the Wolfson had been saved in the ’90s by the Carter family, which has restored many downtown buildings. Among them are the Radius Center, the Legal Professional Building next to the Bexar County Courthouse, and the Toltec Apartments.

But when City Councilman Phil Cortez proposed changing Durango Boulevard to Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard, just before leaving office, it quickly became the year’s most fiercely debated story. The most frustrating part was that proponents of the change consistently poo pooed on the whole notion of historic preservation. They never acknowledged Durango Boulevard’s significance as one of San Antonio’s oldest streets, and instead immediately summoned Chavez’s résumé as a civil rights icon. That was skipping a step. And it wasn’t playing fair with San Antonio’s history.

But the story continued. The San Antonio Conservation Society stepped in and sued the city, claiming it did not follow its own procedures for renaming streets. I sat in one of the hearings, and, my goodness, the thing was convoluted and foreign to the untrained, non-bar passing ear. Earlier this month, a settlement was finalized between the Conservation Society and the city, which added the Historic and Design Review Commission to the process for renaming historic streets.

The River Walk’s new holiday lights received mixed reviews. But what had people scratching their heads was the cost. With LED lights for 2011, the cost of decorating the River Walk for the holidays would increase from $75,000 to $580,000. The city spent an additional $4,000 to hire renowned artist Bill FitzGibbons to design the display. There would be more lights — from 85,000 to 1.76 million — but because the approach was different — wrapping tree trunks and thick branches rather than draping the lights from the River Walk’s tree canopy — it seemed like less trees illuminated.

And then came the squirrels. The pesky rodents started chewing on the wires. (Of course they would!) The city admitted it underestimated damage via squirrel. Now, the project looks to be more expensive because more lights have to be replaced, and because the lights probably have to completely be removed after the holidays. The original plan called for removing only a portion of the lights, as a cost-saving measure. The city would be foolhardy to leave them throughout the year for squirrels to chew on.

The slowly progressing residential movement was overshadowed by streetcars, and street name changes, and smoking ordinances, and LED lights — you name it. What was a big talker in 2010 kind of faded in 2011. But ask any pundit: increasing downtown’s housing stock is still the No. 1 priority for downtown.

The opening of 1221 Broadway was huge for many reasons. The project starts the process of reviving what had been the most decrepit of eyesores at Broadway and U.S. 281 by adding 268 residential units to the area. And, simultaneously, it is the first big puzzle piece to the development along the Museum Reach and Broadway — a catalyst for both of those arteries.

When I started this blog in June 2008, I certainly wasn’t paying as close attention to things as I am now. That same month, like a hammer blow, telecommunications giant AT&T announced it was moving its headquarters from downtown S.A. to Dallas. The building the corporation vacated at 175 E. Houston St. remained empty until July 1 of this year, when the lease ended. Shortly after, it was announced that HVHC Inc. (parent company of retailer VisionWorks) and Argo Group US would soon move into the building, together bringing more than 400 jobs to downtown, as well as occupying about 190,000 square feet of the tower’s nearly 280,000 square feet.

Fresh crops of residents are always at the top of the pyramid. But new workers are a close second.

In September, with the appropriate pomp and circumstance, UTSA Roadrunner football marched into downtown like a revelation, really. Seriously, tailgate at one of the games and you’ll know. This kind of spectacle, this kind of scene, was something completely foreign to our downtown and the city. The inaugural game was a historic moment for sure, drawing more than 50,000 of what seemed like mostly newbie Roadrunner fans. But after that day, the vibe continued every time the Roadrunners had a home game.

Last year, I wrote about the influx of new events and how they complimented the classics. Roadrunner football games was like icing on the cake already covered in icing. And the usual lull between tourism season and the holidays seemed nonexistent because of them.

. . .7. Goodbye, Municipal Auditorium

This one sneaked up on people. The general public, I think, started to loose interest during the monotony of the planning process. The extremely technical details kind of turned people off as architects presented their case to the Historic and Design Review Commission throughout the year. But it was in those meetings it was revealed that “restoring” Municipal Auditorium into the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts would require demolishing the building save for its facade. The media reported this, but I don’t think it really registered until the wrecking balls started swinging in the summer.

The planning process for the redevelopment of HemisFair Park was kind of boring. Not much happened. Some interesting ideas were thrown out, but nothing mind-boggling. The real story reveals itself when you take several steps back and see that progress actually occurred. City leaders have been talking about what to do with HemisFair since HemisFair ’68. Last decade, a master plan was drafted. But in 2011 the city truly got over the hump by drafting a new plan, and allocating around $17 million for the first projects.

Although construction has yet to start, the vote itself was historic, as it ensured the city would be returning to streetcar for the first time since the 1930s. But all of the behind-the-scenes activity leading up to the vote was equally entertaining. For its starter system, VIA Metropolitan Transit proposed an east-west line, which would connect the Robert Thompson Transit Center at the Alamodome with the envisaged Westside Multimodal Center, and would build a north-south line in the second phase. VIA required about $40 million from the city, and so the city had leverage. Enter Mayor Julián Castro with a starter plan of his own which mostly travels north-south.

All this time, opponents pointed to a public vote in 2000 which shot down a city-wide light rail system. Although not as ambitious, they still sounded off against streetcar continuing to ask why the issue wasn’t put to a public vote. And although I’m for streetcar, opponents of it would be justified in criticizing the city for a lack of public process. But I digress. A most memorable moment of 2011 was several City Council members, just before the vote, speaking directly to critics and basically saying to them: tough $#!&.

The reopening of downtown’s most storied bar took about three years. And so we waited, and waited. And waited. When it finally opened, it was an event. And it was the reaction itself that was borderline fascinating. This being a posh version of the former Esquire, old-timers who weren’t interested in any drink with bitters drank there early on. And so did the foo-foo. And although diversity was one of the Esquire’s trademarks (at least in the later years), the foo foo went there for that gritty experience. It doesn’t work the other way around.

I shied away from the place early on because of this. And then they adjusted their beer prices, and so I returned. And while I still don’t quite jive with the place, it’s growing on me. Bring those beer prices down, and all of a sudden I don’t mind paying $10 for a burger that doesn’t come with fries.